Lightermen, bar pilots of the Aransas pass

The Texas coast is sheltered by long shallow lagoons and bays that are connected to the Gulf by narrow openings — passes — whose channels once were constantly shifting, opening and silting in. A British consul wrote in 1838 that the bays of Texas would never make good harbors because of the treacherous sandbars choking the passes.

Because larger ships couldn't sail into the bays, "lightering" sprang up on the islands next to the two major passes, the Aransas Pass and Pass Cavallo. Lightering — off-loading from larger to smaller vessels — was a major activity in the 1840s and 1850s before the coming of long piers.

Besides lightering, ships small enough for the bays needed expert guidance to make it through the narrow, winding, shifting, treacherous channels of the passes. This was provided by local bar pilots for a fee. They kept track of the changes in the channel and the depth of water over the bar.

The most famous bar pilots in this part of Texas were the Mercers, originally from Lancashire, England, who located on St. Joseph's Island at a settlement called Aransas in 1855. Aransas then was a place of bar pilots, lightermen, old sailors and, it was said, a few old pirates, a little tribe on the island. The settlement of Aransas was across the pass from today's Port Aransas.

Robert Mercer and other bar pilots moved across the pass to Mustang Island and founded what would later become Port Aransas.

During the Civil War, the USS Afton landed troops on Mustang. They burned the Mercer cabin, crossed the pass and burned the village of Aransas. After the war, the settlement on Mustang recovered but the village on St. Joseph's did not. Even the traces of it disappeared.

Our famous bar pilots, the Mercers, are known to us because they kept a diary, written in the style of a ship's log, telling of the day's events and the coming and going of ships. Robert Mercer, the patriarch, started the log; after his death in 1876, his two sons John and Ned continued to make the entries.

It must have been a Mercer routine to salt away another day by making entries in the log.

An example from August, 1866 — "Mosquitoes are powerful bad; had to build fires to make smoke and keep the mosquitoes off." When Robert ran out of chewing tobacco, the log notes (in a rare first-person reference) — "I'd fight any man in the U.S. for a good hard chew."

Ships approaching the pass would hoist a flag to signal they wanted a pilot. The Mercers kept watch from a pilot's lookout on the roof. Many entries are filled with the arrival and departure of ships: "Schooner Clements came for Corpus. Got aground on the flats." "The Arthur anchored with a flag up for a pilot." Since the pilots charged a hefty fee — $3 per draft foot — sometimes a captain would risk crossing the bar and navigating the channel without a pilot. He could pocket the fee. The Mercer logs would note without comment — "The captain took no pilot."

More than one captain learned that saving the pilot's fee could lead to disaster. Terrible shipwrecks occurred because the captain took no pilot, including the wreck of the sidewheel steamer Mary on Nov. 30, 1876. (There was a dispute about whether the Mercers ignored the flag requesting a pilot.) The ship arrived off the pass as a fierce, freezing norther hit. A passenger said it was impossible to anchor in the crashing seas and the captain decided to take her in over the bar himself.

The Mary struck a buoy, opening a hole in her side, and struck the bar, pounding her bottom out as huge waves lashed the stricken ship with enormous force. The Mary was flying distress flags when pilot John Mercer, brother Ned, and two other pilots, Tom Brundrette and Tom Lacey, reached the ship, looming up like the side of a cliff, with the tiny pilot boat being tossed on the immense waves. They couldn't get close enough to make a rescue in the crashing seas.

Mrs. S. G. Miller was on board. She wrote that — "Trial after trial was made to get to us, but each time the great waves carried our rescuers beyond our reach. . . After three or four hours of hard work, the rope was caught by one of our men, and the small boat was lashed to the Mary by her gangplank. In order to reach this gangplank, we waded through water waist-deep on deck. As I started across the gangplank, the Mary broke away from the pilot boat, down I went into the sea. As I fell, the heel of my shoe caught on one of the slats. This broke my fall and enabled me to catch hold of the two sides of the plank with my hands. Scrambling to a sitting position on the gangplank, I bobbed up and down as each big wave struck. It seemed an eternity before the sailors caught hold of it again and I was helped into the rescue boat."

The wet passengers, numbed by the cold and the events, went to the Mercer cabin where they found a roaring fire in the fireplace and dried their clothes.

The Mary's 7,000 barrels of cargo was scattered on shores from Port Aransas to Port Isabel. Flour covered the beaches for miles. Some of the cargo included strychnine and people were warned not to sample anything from unlabeled bottles. The newspaper noted that beachcombing after the wreck was profitable — "From the salvage of the Mary, a number of persons have been made temporarily rich."

The lucky passengers of the steamship Mary were not the first or last to meet the Mercers. This family of bar pilots had been rescuing shipwreck survivors and guiding ships over the bar for two decades, and would do so for two decades more. Besides being bar pilots at the Aransas pass, they were salvage operators, beachcombers, and ran a ranch on the island they called El Mar. They were also the founders of Port Aransas.